Kakunupmawa (the Sun)
Kakunupmawa, the Sun, is among the most powerful of the Chumash sky people. The ethnographies recorded by John P. Harrington describe him as an old man, a widower living in the upper world with his two daughters, who each day carries a torch of rolled bark across the sky to give the world its light. His name was understood in the sacred language as the radiance of the child born at the winter solstice, and the great winter-solstice observance was held in his honour to coax him to begin his northward return so that warmth and the growing season might come back. Every night the Sun and his partner Golden Eagle play the gambling game of peon against Sky Coyote and Morning Star; the running score, settled at the winter solstice, determines whether the coming year will bring rain and abundance or famine and death.
Domains
- sun
- fate and mortality
Powers
- to carry a torch of rolled bark across the sky and so give the world its daylight
- to gamble nightly in the peon stick-game for the harvests and lives of human beings
Epithets
- KakunupmawaTravis Hudson and Ernest Underhay, Crystals in the Sky (Ballena Press, 1978) (secondary)
Relations
- rival: Shnilemun (Sky Coyote)The Sun and Sky Coyote are the opposing principals of the nightly peon game in the upper world, the Sun pulling against the people's interest while Sky Coyote pulls for them.Thomas C. Blackburn, December's Child (University of California Press, 1975) (secondary); Travis Hudson and Ernest Underhay, Crystals in the Sky (Ballena Press, 1978) (secondary)
- ally: Slo'w (the Golden Eagle)Golden Eagle is the Sun's partner against Sky Coyote and Morning Star in the celestial peon game.Travis Hudson and Ernest Underhay, Crystals in the Sky (Ballena Press, 1978) (secondary)
Sources
- Kakunupmawa is the Chumash Sun, an aged torch-bearer of the upper world whose nightly gambling with Sky Coyote and his solstitial turning govern human fortune.: Travis Hudson and Ernest Underhay, Crystals in the Sky: An Intellectual Odyssey Involving Chumash Astronomy, Cosmology, and Rock Art (Ballena Press Anthropological Papers No. 10, 1978) (secondary); Thomas C. Blackburn, December's Child: A Book of Chumash Oral Narratives (University of California Press, 1975) (secondary)